PARIS — Amid pressure from the families of the passengers of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 for more transparency about the search for the missing jet, Inmarsat, the global satellite communications company, confirmed Tuesday that it would soon publish a full record of the communications received from the plane the day it disappeared.
An analysis by Inmarsat of a series of fleeting radio signals that were picked up on March 8, the day the airplane disappeared, by one of its satellites played a central role in narrowing the search for the plane’s presumed crash site to an area in the southern Indian Ocean some 500 miles off the northwestern coast of Australia.
But more than two months of searching has so far yielded no trace of the plane, a Boeing 777-200, or of the 239 people who were on board. That has prompted calls from relatives and some outside experts for investigators to release the data on which Inmarsat based its findings, in the hope of identifying any errors or missed clues that could help locate the aircraft.
Tracking Flight 370
The sequence of events known by the authorities, in local times.
“It is imperative for us to provide helpful information to the next of kin and general public,” Inmarsat said in a joint statement with Malaysia’s Department of Civil Aviation.
Emphasizing that the raw communications data was only one element of the investigation, both organizations said they were “working for the release of the data communication logs and the description of the analysis for public consumption.”
Jonathan Sinnatt, a spokesman at Inmarsat’s headquarters in London, said the company was working with the Malaysian government — along with technical advisers from Britain’s Air Accidents Investigation Branch, the National Transportation Safety Board of the United States, and Boeing, among others — to prepare a “package” of information that would be released first to the families of the crash victims and later published online by the Malaysian authorities. That process, he said, was expected to take about a week.
Inmarsat’s engineers have long emphasized that the volume of information received from Flight 370 was exceedingly small, amounting to just 14 data points — seven automated “pings,” or electronic handshakes, between the plane and Inmarsat’s satellite, and seven corresponding transmissions between the satellite and a ground station in Perth, Australia.
“It’s literally just 14 numbers,” Mr. Sinnatt said. “It won’t make sense to anybody who doesn’t understand the technology, which is why we are now working with the investigation to put together an explanation about how you use that data and what it means.”
Citing the strict international protocols governing the investigation, Inmarsat has so far declined to respond to criticism from some scientists not involved in the investigation who have suggested that the company’s analysis could be flawed, as well media speculation that the wreckage of the plane might lie far from the seabed that is being mapped by hydrographic experts from Australia, China and Malaysia.
Some commentators have publicly accused the investigation team of deliberately withholding information that would disprove Inmarsat’s findings.
Inmarsat engineers have privately expressed frustration in recent weeks with what they perceive as misguided second-guessing of their work.
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“I think there are a lot of well-meaning people out there who have made some very flawed attempts at doing the analysis, but they unfortunately haven’t understood the basic elements,” said one Inmarsat employee, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter.
Once the communications logs are made available, this person said, “I expect a lot of these people will try and run the data” and speculate on their meaning.
Some investigators have also justified their reticence about releasing Inmarsat’s data by citing concerns that they could be used by intelligence services in China and elsewhere to enable the tracking of other aircraft.
Rémi Jouty, the director of the French Bureau of Investigations and Analysis, which has been advising investigators search for the missing plane, told reporters in Paris last week that he had “tremendous confidence in the work that was done” by Inmarsat, which he said had determined with “quasi-certainty” that Flight 370 ended within what he said was a “manageable” search zone in the southern Indian Ocean.
Tim Farrar, a former systems engineer in California who advises companies on satellite and telecommunications issues and has closely followed the search for the plane on his blog, said he was encouraged by the decision to publish Inmarsat’s raw data and said he hoped it would help put some of the more extreme speculation about the fate of Flight 370 to rest.
“There is so little information and a lot of theories and scepticism about what happened and the whole process has been really unclear,” Mr. Farrar said. He said he had been contacted by relatives of passengers from the missing plane.
“I think their desire is to have other people look at the calculation sequence and the supporting data, and see if they can replicate what Inmarsat did,” Mr. Farrar said. “I think that’s a very valid thing to want to do. The question is whether there will be enough information made available for that.”
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